[OOC] Character Application: lastvoyages
"Hi! My name is Charles Bartowski. But...you can call me Chuck. Those are my shoes; this is my life."
User Name/Nick: Alex Prime
User LJ: greencat3
AIM/IM: TeriyakiPickle
E-mail: greencat3 [at] gmail [dot] com
Other Characters: Jason Bourne (brokenweapon), Josiah Bartlet (nobelprez)
Character Name: Charles Irving “Chuck” Bartowski
Series: Chuck
Age: Late 20s - just using Zachary Levi’s age at filming here so I’ll say 29.
From When?: The end of the third season, after he’s quit spying (for about twenty seconds, because Status Quo Is God…and of course the show got picked up for another season, so hooray!).
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Chuck’s a good guy, despite some of the morally grey and flat-out insane things he’s had to do as the Intersect.
Item: His trusty iPhone.
Abilities/Powers: He has a special supercomputer called the Intersect in his head, which “flashes” to show him intelligence on certain people or things. That part is likely not going to see any use on the Barge unless some canon baddies show up for some reason. The Intersect 2.0 also includes instantaneous training on weapons and fighting techniques, but he doesn’t know them all the time and can’t flash/instantly learn them if he’s emotional - which for Chuck is a big problem, because he’s an emotional guy. He also has a bit of an issue with flashing on skills, especially violent ones, at inappropriate times. (He once roundhouse-kicked Lester unconscious because Lester was playfully imitating Steven Seagal’s fighting moves at him. In the Buy More.) The Intersect 2.0 is also affecting his mind - when he’s without the Governor, he can’t sleep without having some incredibly vivid, disturbing dream caused by it. The Intersect 2.0 will also slowly drive him insane without the Governor, causing horrible, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem-type effects - e.g. he can see the world ‘glitching’ (like everything looks upside down for a moment, there are visual distortions like ‘dead pixels’), loud screeching sounds in his ears, and splitting headaches. So being Chuck is not always fun and games time.
Note: It’s not entirely clear if he needs the Governor anymore since his “reboot” during the fight with Shaw. I’ll check during season 4 and adjust as necessary.
Chuck also speaks Klingon.
Personality:
“Chuck is brave. Chuck is loyal. You know, Chuck can quote Wrath of Khan word for word, and Chuck is courageous. Chuck’s got a wicked vinyl collection, and Chuck has the wisdom not to eat garbage from the break room crisper.” - Morgan Grimes, 1x06, ‘Chuck versus the Sandworm’
Chuck is a nice guy caught in a cruel world. He’s intelligent - went to Stanford on scholarship - and personable. Overall, his honesty and integrity are deeply important to him (which might explain why he was so exceptionally angry about Bryce Larkin planting the test key that got him kicked out of Stanford under his bed). He struggles to maintain those principles in his new spy life, but it’s difficult when he has to deceive everyone he loves, including his sister, his best friend, and his father (for a time). Chuck is a responsible man, willing to own up when he’s screwed the pooch on an operation, and he’s willing to do almost anything - usually alone - to make it right again. He went to insane lengths to retrieve his sister’s wedding ring from a Fulcrum agent who had gotten it by accident and decided to help save a Chinese agent’s brother from kidnappers because his own ineptitude had foiled the initial rescue attempt.
Chuck’s family and friends are extremely important to him, even to the point where he and his sister were poisoned, and he gave the only antidote available to her. He has frequently disobeyed orders when they could have endangered his friends. Unfortunately, his affable and trusting nature has been used against him; he’s been manipulated by both enemy agents (read: his ex-girlfriend Jill) and his own team (read: Casey, Carina). Chuck is a caring, sensitive, funny guy - the type girls always say they want, but never go for.
Buried deeply beneath Chuck’s timid demeanor is a wellspring of courage. While he admits a very low tolerance for pain and a crippling fear of needles, he can summon the will to risk his own life if it means he’s protecting people close to him, such as his family or his team. His phobia of needles is so great that he goaded an enemy agent into threatening torture with a massive syringe - while it seems counterproductive, it served the purpose of making him pass out in sheer terror. He did manage to temporarily overcome this fear of needles when saving a room full of scientists - and Casey - by allowing himself to be injected with a modified virus so his blood would create antibodies for those who were infected.
As the supervisor of the “Nerd Herd” at the Buy More (the fictitious Best Buy-like chain) in Burbank, Chuck is a problem-solver, and very, very good with all kinds of technology (and the creator of a rather nasty computer virus which they used to call the “Bartowski Special” back at Stanford). He even figured out how to defuse a bomb using a computer virus from a porn website (really). He’s very observant and can tackle almost any type of puzzle, Intersect or no Intersect. (However, he’s prone to making very obvious statements when he’s nervous or in shock: “Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh…you’re not dead…”) Chuck is also an avid gamer, taking time out for such staples as Gears of War, Call of Duty, and Halo. Outside of video games, he has a fondness for sci-fi movies like Tron and Dune, even going so far as to dress up as a Sandworm with his best friend Morgan each Halloween. He once used his knowledge of flight simulators to safely land a helicopter - and used the latent mathematical patterns in the Rush song “Tom Sawyer” to beat Missile Command and prevent World War III - so don’t let anyone tell him that video games are a waste of time. He’s also a comic book fan, so watch out, Marvel/DCverse peeps, he’s going to be fanboying all up in your business.
Path to Redemption: N/A
History: Chuck Bartowski has lived in California his entire life; he was born and raised in Encino. When he was about nine or ten years old, he wandered into his father’s home office and accidentally downloaded the Intersect prototype into his head. Remarkably, he suffered no ill effects and was mostly confused, and his father was incredibly relieved that the Intersect hadn’t destroyed his mind. It was around that time that their mother was captured by enemy agents (or left of her own free will; at this point canon is still ambiguous on whether she’s good or evil), rendering his father Stephen “never really there” and eternally preoccupied. Stephen left his children when Chuck was in high school to protect them from his research. (In a bit of Fridge Brilliance, Chuck scored incredibly high on a subliminal image test in college, making him a prime target for CIA recruitment until Bryce got him kicked out of Stanford. His proto-Intersect might have influenced his ability to retain and process large amounts of information and thus render him the best person to actually use the Intersect. It’s destiny, I tells ya.)
Chuck entered Stanford University in 1999, a scholarship student, and met Bryce Larkin, a fellow freshman - soon to be his greatest friend and worst enemy. Bryce introduced him to Jill Roberts, who Chuck began to date. Things were going great for Chuck until his senior year, when Bryce Larkin framed him for cheating on a midterm exam. Due to Stanford’s zero-tolerance cheating policy, he was immediately kicked out of school, twelve credits short of attaining an engineering degree. After getting a job at the Burbank Buy More with his best friend Morgan, he went to visit Jill and explain to her that he didn’t cheat on the test, but she was already dating Bryce.
Years went by, and Chuck moved in with his sister Ellie and her boyfriend Devon (aka Captain Awesome), both doctors. On his 26th birthday, Chuck received an email from none other than Bryce Larkin, who was now working for the CIA (and, unbeknownst to Chuck at the time, had been shot in his attempt to escape). When Chuck opened the email and solved a simple riddle about a game they had both played extensively in college, the entire contents of the Intersect were downloaded into his brain, a process that took all night and left him with a lasting headache.
The CIA and NSA both independently sent agents to find who Bryce had sent the Intersect to. The CIA agent, Sarah Walker, went to Chuck’s place of employment and flirted with him to figure out where he lived. Chuck came home with his best friend Morgan to find a ninja (Sarah) trying to steal his computer. In the ensuing tussle (in which the boys were laughably outmatched), the computer was destroyed, making Chuck the only source of Intersect data in the entire world. Undaunted, Sarah got a date with Chuck to try and find out what he knew about the Intersect and Bryce. The NSA, however, was less inclined to take the subtle route. An entire team of goons went after Chuck on his ‘date’ with Sarah, forcing her to break her cover and get Chuck out of danger. John Casey, the NSA agent in charge, pursued them and confronted Sarah on a rooftop, preparing to shoot Chuck. Chuck managed to save his own skin by “flashing” (accessing Intersect data) on an important general who was giving a talk at a nearby hotel...and the bomb plot that was supposed to kill him. Sarah and Casey took him to the hotel and Chuck was able to defuse the bomb.
The two agencies, led by General Beckman and Director Graham, were at a loss as to what to do with him. Casey wanted Chuck to be locked away in a secure facility, given the volume of sensitive information in his noggin. Sarah wanted to try and get it out of him so he could resume a normal life. Chuck decided that since he held all the cards, he was going to walk away and pretend it never happened.
Fat chance of that. The next morning, John Casey showed up at the Buy More, taking a cover job as a “green shirt” to stay close to Chuck. Sarah took a job at the hot dog restaurant across the parking lot, the Wienerlicious (which came complete with a very fanservicey uniform). The two agents were in town to stay, at least until the new Intersect was built, both under orders to protect him. Casey also had orders to kill Chuck when the new Intersect came online, because they wouldn’t be able to guarantee the security of the old Intersect.
As usual, nothing came easy. The doctor who was supposed to remove the Intersect from Chuck’s head ended up being rogue and trying to sell him to North Korea. Sarah and Casey were stuck with Chuck, and Chuck was stuck with the Intersect in his head. He was proven not to be entirely useless when his unique skills led Sarah and Casey to take down a ruthless arms dealer known only as La Ciudad…at an art auction. Hilarity ensued. Chuck’s exploits with the Intersect included such varied missions as stealing a diamond from a terrorist financier, rescuing a Chinese agent’s brother from an LA Triad in exchange for her defection, and disarming a bomb set by a mad genius (seriously) that would have exploded the Santa Monica Pier on Halloween. Unfortunately, the last mission had required him to give up his shot at the Assistant Manager position at the Buy More, leaving the store in the hated hands of one Harry Tang (since the real manager, Big Mike, is content to rely on the ‘AssMan’).
Chuck’s life was further complicated when he had to go on a mission to save the professor who had kicked him out of Stanford, because the professor worked for the CIA. Chuck refused at first, but later flashed on his old college ID and discovered that all his data up through college had been put into the Intersect. His curiosity was enough to get him to return to Stanford, and while he was there he discovered that Bryce had gotten him expelled because he hadn’t wanted Chuck to be recruited into the CIA, even though it ended up destroying their very close friendship.
And speak of the devil - Bryce Larkin wasn’t dead at all. He had been rescued by Fulcrum, a corrupt organization within the intelligence community, because he’d managed to convince them that he had downloaded the Intersect, so it was in their best interests to keep him alive. He used Team Bartowski to help him come in and let the CIA know that he wasn’t actually a rogue agent. Afterwards he left on another mission, going back to chase down and destroy Fulcrum.
Shortly after that, the new Intersect was getting ready to be brought online, and Chuck discovered Fulcrum bugs within the Buy More. The next morning Chuck went to the Buy More to find that everything had disappeared, because the CIA had removed it all to a warehouse to check for bugs. This was a problem, because Devon had given Chuck an engagement ring to take care of so Ellie wouldn’t find it, and Chuck had left it in his locker at the Buy More. However, the ring wasn’t in the CIA’s custody, and Chuck was also confronted with the very real possibility that he’d been compromised and would have to be put in a bunker, away from his family and friends and able to give them no warning or explanation. Happily, the intel receiver was retrieved by the CIA before it could end up in Fulcrum’s hands, Chuck didn’t have to go underground, and he found Awesome’s engagement ring. Awesome proposed to Ellie, and for a little while it seemed like everything was all right in Chuck’s world.
With the news that the new Intersect was ready, Chuck was nearly ecstatic. Finally, he could have a normal life again, even if that did mean he would lose Sarah. Still, he persuaded her to go on a real date with him before she was out of his life. Unfortunately, Fulcrum had tampered with the component parts of the new Intersect computer, causing it to explode and kill Director Graham and all of the CIA agents trying to download it into their brains. In the meantime, Casey crept through Chuck’s apartment, preparing to carry out the kill order he’d been assigned in the event that the human Intersect became redundant. Thankfully, seconds before he was about to shoot, the doorbell rang and Chuck went to go answer it. It was Sarah with the bad news, and Casey left, relieved, since he hadn’t wanted to kill Chuck.
So the Intersect and Team Bartowski were set to fight Fulcrum how they could, with a spanking new spy base, called Castle, under the frozen yogurt shop Orange Orange (which means Sarah got a less fanservicey uniform). Chuck ended up briefly getting back together with his ex-girlfriend Jill, who (surprise!) actually turned out to be a Fulcrum agent. He met Sarah’s father, a con man named Jack Burton, and attended her high school reunion. While on a mission pretending to be a married couple in the suburbs, Chuck was captured and forced by all the Fulcrum agents living in their housing development to download a Fulcrum version of the Intersect that had either driven mad or killed all other subjects. He was all right, but he tricked them into downloading it as well. They weren’t as lucky.
Chuck had been personally researching the Intersect itself and its mysterious creator Orion, hiding a complex diagram of what he knew on the back of the Tron poster his father had given him as a child. Since Ellie’s wedding was coming up, Chuck and Sarah used CIA resources to locate Stephen Bartowski. They managed to persuade him to come back for Ellie’s wedding, while Chuck infiltrated the headquarters of his father’s old rival Ted Roark. Stephen had come to confront Roark himself, and Chuck saved him from a beating by Roark’s security team. His father returned the favor by revealing that he was in fact Orion, and had left to protect his family from those who would use the Intersect for evil. Almost immediately after this Stephen was captured by Roark’s people and forced to build a new Fulcrum Intersect in a secret facility outside of Barstow. Roark would have killed Chuck but Stephen agreed to go quietly if his son was safe.
After using Jill to get further information about Fulcrum, Chuck let her go in direct violation of orders. This was the last straw; General Beckman told Sarah to bring Chuck in so they could put him in a bunker because he was becoming too hard to control. Sarah realized she was in love with Chuck and defied this order, running to Barstow to try and save Stephen. Casey was promoted to Colonel and sent to capture the runaways. He did so, fighting off a Fulcrum team, and took the pair into custody. Meanwhile, Devon had grown suspicious about Chuck’s disappearance and Casey’s odd behavior (like breaking into Chuck’s room to search around). He feared Casey had kidnapped Chuck, and his instincts were technically correct. While Casey went back to his apartment when he noticed Devon snooping around on the security cameras, Chuck and Sarah escaped from the base due to temporary power outage and followed him, intent on preventing a massacre. Awesome managed to hold his own until the cavalry arrived, and Chuck was left with no choice but to tell him about his double life - and make him promise not to tell Ellie.
Chuck and Sarah tied Casey up and went back to Barstow; Casey followed them once he managed to get out of his bonds, pissed off that they hadn’t asked him to help. Roark was preparing to use the new Intersect that Stephen had created to make an army of Fulcrum agents. Stephen told Chuck to look at the screen while the Intersect files were flickering across it; he had made an anti-Intersect instead, which did nothing to the amassed Fulcrum agents but removed the Intersect from Chuck’s head. Naturally, they had to explode Roark’s base before they left with Stephen in tow for Ellie’s wedding the next day. Chuck was now Intersect-less; he and Sarah could finally date.
However, the day of the wedding, new orders came in. Casey was to leave with his Special Forces team, and gave Chuck his personal number in case of emergency. Sarah was reassigned to be Bryce Larkin’s partner again, and Chuck was asked to work on the new Intersect program. He refused, wanting to return to a normal life. Of course, this being Chuck’s life, something was bound to go wrong. Roark showed up to the wedding, demanding the Intersect (while the wedding guests were distracted by Jeff and Lester’s rather splendid rendition of Mr. Roboto). Chuck had called Casey, who came to the rescue with his team in the nick of time and captured Roark, but the wedding had been ruined and Ellie was pissed. Chuck used the generous government stipend he’d been given for his services as the Intersect to set up a new wedding, and Sarah let Bryce know that she wasn’t going to go with him.
In the meantime, it turned out that one of Casey’s men was a traitor and murdered Roark, as well as the rest of Casey’s team, only sparing the colonel because Casey had saved his life. The traitor also revealed that he was not a part of Fulcrum before knocking Casey out. Bryce left the wedding party with a man posing as a government agent as Stephen watched, but Stephen had uploaded a very early beta version of the Intersect into his own head and knew that the agent with Bryce was not to be trusted. He told Sarah and Chuck, who went to go rescue Casey and Bryce from the ambush.
With Casey in tow, they headed to the building Bryce had been taken to. Bryce had escaped into the Intersect vault, but he’d incurred a fatal gunshot wound, and told Chuck to destroy the new Intersect since it was too powerful to let fall into the wrong hands. He also informed Chuck that Fulcrum was only one small part of an even shadowier organization called the Ring, and died. Chuck downloaded the new Intersect before destroying it. The Ring operatives, led by the traitor, brought Sarah and Casey in as prisoners, preparing to kill them for destroying the Intersect. The moment Sarah was threatened, Chuck flashed on something he’d never been able to use before - epic fighting skills. This led to the worst ending for a season (and possible series) finale ever.
Thankfully, it was not so, and the series continued. Chuck had been training to become a real spy to make better use of the Intersect 2.0, but he flunked out of spy school when his emotions got out of control and he couldn’t properly flash on skills, and he’d refused to run away with Sarah. He returned to Echo Park and was depressed for long enough to end up looking like Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, all unkempt and surviving on nothing but cheeseballs. After being humiliated by Emmett, the Buy More’s new manager (who had deposed Big Mike in a Godfather-worthy coup), Chuck used his key to get into Castle and meet with Casey, who mentioned that he and Sarah had a mission. Desperate to do something worthwhile, Chuck re-acquired personal grooming habits and crashed the mission. Sarah and Casey were convinced he was going to ruin it until he ended up showing off what the Intersect 2.0 could do; they were re-convinced when Chuck tackled Sarah to get her out of a Ring assassin’s line of fire, believing he was ruining the mission because he was jealous. The assassin’s men later captured Chuck and Sarah at the Buy More, and Casey had to go rescue them in Mexico - but not before Chuck regained his confidence and ability to flash in dangerous situations. At the end of the episode, Chuck got his job back - both with the government, and at Buy More. Chuck and Sarah ended up reconciling later when she found out that he had decided not to run away with her because he knew he had the chance to do something good and help people, and she’d had faith in him, and that he loved her.
Captain Awesome was later mistaken for the resident spy in the Bartowski family, and Chuck had to divert the Ring away - which meant killing the leader of the local Ring cell. This was carried out by a new agent who had just been assigned to Team Bartowski: Daniel Shaw, the CIA’s expert on the Ring. Incidentally, his wife had also been killed by the Ring. Thinking it was time to move on, Shaw began pursuing Sarah.
As the season progressed, Chuck was given more spy duties, such as an asset of his own, who he later had to have put in a bunker; torturing Casey to sell his cover as an assassin; and removing a bullet from Casey’s leg when he flashed on medical skills.
The Ring had tracked the spies enough to figure out that Castle was in some way connected with the Buy More, and sent their men in under cover of merger operations to try and locate the entrance to Castle or any spies within the store. This was a bad idea, because the Buy Morians revolted. With Nerf guns. Chuck was also in the Buy More at the time because Shaw had benched him for not being able to flash due to his emotional issues, which is kind of what happens when you shack up with your asset’s one true love. During the lockdown of the Buy More, Morgan discovers the secret entrance into Castle by following the Ring operatives, and he and Chuck are captured and tied up. Chuck tells Morgan everything, and through their talk Chuck regained the ability to flash. He then proceeded to kick the ass of every single Ring agent except the last one (who Morgan got). Shaw was all ready to set Morgan up in Witness Protection, but Chuck countered that Morgan could be a valuable member of the team. Shaw let him stay, much to Morgan’s relief.
It was also discovered that Casey’s real name was not John Casey, but Alex Coburn. He’d faked his own death in 1989 to join an NSA black ops team, unaware that his fiancée was pregnant at the time. Surprise, Casey. Casey’s old commanding officer was blackmailing Casey into stealing an emotional suppressant called Laudanol - if he didn’t, Casey’s old fiancée was going to be killed. Chuck took the Laudanol to help control his emotions, and for a short fight scene the Intersect 2.0’s true power was revealed, since it basically turned Chuck into the Terminator until Sarah stopped him from strangling a Ring operative to death with his bare hands. Casey also discovered that his fiancée had been pregnant, and now had a college-aged daughter named Alex, after him. Although Casey had killed his old commanding officer, he had still committed treason - which, let’s be honest, is par for the course on Team Bartowski at this point - so General Beckman stripped him of his rank and his spy duties. John Casey was now a civilian. And then there were three.
Shaw thought that it was time for Chuck to become a real spy by completing a red test - that is, by making his first kill. Chuck was supposed to shoot a mole, but couldn’t go through with it, so Casey the civilian shot the mole from the shadows, leading Sarah and Shaw to believe that Chuck had in fact completed the red test. Unfortunately for Chuck, this means that Sarah thinks he’s not the same person anymore, and she doesn’t love the “new Chuck”. Chuck was sent to Washington, DC to be officially inducted as an agent, and returned to Burbank the next day to assemble his team for his new mission in Rome.
Sarah wouldn’t take his calls, so Morgan and Devon borrowed Jeff’s stalker van, and Chuck, to stakeout Sarah and Shaw on a date. Morgan lured Shaw out by pretending to be a Ring agent, and then they were attacked by actual Ring agents. Shaw decided to swallow a tracking device to call in an airstrike and use himself as bait to destroy the Ring once and for all. The Ring found the tracking device and removed it from Shaw; in the meantime, Sarah refused to let Shaw go alone and Chuck locked her in Castle while he went to go save Shaw. Sarah got in touch with Casey at the Buy More, who came to free her.
While a prisoner of the Ring, Shaw was shown the surveillance footage of the night his wife was killed, which revealed that Sarah had been the assassin on her red test, working under the CIA’s orders, not the Ring’s. At that point Shaw pretty much snapped and went over to the Dark Side. As Chuck didn’t know this, he went and managed to rescue Shaw anyway. Chuck asked Sarah to go with him to Rome, mirroring their exchange from earlier, and Casey informed her that he had been the one to shoot the mole, not Chuck. Shaw came to Sarah’s apartment before she left to meet with Chuck, telling her that they had a new mission. Back at Castle, Chuck was shown the footage of Shaw’s wife’s death, and realized that Sarah was not safe around Shaw.
Shaw faked everyone out by pretending that he forgave Sarah, and the three of them were ordered on a mission in DC to find the Ring Director, who has Intersect components. Shaw apparently kills him, as Sarah and Chuck hear a gunshot, but that was just a ruse. Shaw had joined the Ring. While playing both sides, Shaw gets a mission to go to Paris with Sarah, trying to find other Intersect components that had been traced there. Morgan’s extensive knowledge of action movie fight scenes helped him identify Shaw’s fight in the surveillance footage from DC as choreographed, and Chuck realized that Shaw was working for the Ring. He tried to contact General Beckman, but she was angry about Morgan, a civilian, being in Castle and suspended Chuck from duty. Chuck teamed up with Casey to fly to Paris and stop Shaw.
Shaw poisoned Sarah with a temporary paralytic agent and Sarah was forced to watch as he handed over the technical specs of the Intersect to the Director. At that point Chuck and Casey arrived. Casey took off after the Director while Chuck confronted Shaw. They fought, and Shaw won, but Chuck sought out a gun and pursued him to a bridge, where Shaw intended to throw the paralyzed Sarah into the Seine and let her drown. Reasoning failed, so Chuck shot Shaw in the chest three times. Shaw fell off the bridge and almost dragged Sarah down with him, but Chuck saved her.
Casey had captured the Director and was rewarded with his rank and job back, as well as getting Morgan a place on Team Bartowski for all his help in identifying Shaw as an enemy agent. Finally, Chuck and Sarah were able to start a real relationship. They ran, but ended up stumbling onto a Basque terrorist and going on “one last mission”. Morgan and Casey tracked them down, they realized that they didn’t want to quit being spies after all, and while General Beckman disapproved of their relationship on principle, off the record she admitted to them that it was “about damn time” they got together.
And for a little while, things were okay.
Right up until the Intersect started messing with Chuck’s brain. Chuck started to have surreal and disturbing dreams, which he interpreted as flashes, but nobody would believe him. After he nearly caused an international incident by punching a foreign dignitary in the face (to knock out a fake tooth filled with intel), Beckman stripped him of active rank and put him in a mental hospital for CIA burnouts. The real intel tooth was eventually found when the dignitary came to kill Chuck in the hospital, and Chuck was reinstated. With the reinstatement came a warning from his psychiatrist that the Intersect posed a very real danger to Chuck’s mental health with continued use. Chuck dreamed that Shaw was alive…and given that his Intersect-assisted dreams so far had turned out to be true, he was worried.
It was around this time that Ellie and Devon went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo with Doctors Without Borders. While they were there, a Ring agent poisoned Awesome and made it look like malaria, forcing them to return home so Devon could be treated and recover. When they were back in Burbank, Ellie was contacted by the Ring agent, Justin, who was posing as a CIA operative. Team Bartowski raided Shaw’s old penthouse at the same time as Justin, who told them that Shaw was in fact dead, but Chuck’s dreams didn’t stop.
Justin convinced Ellie to contact her father, luring him in from hiding. Since Stephen Bartowski is both observant and a little crazy, he figured out that Chuck had the Intersect 2.0…by throwing a knife at his son’s face. Chuck caught it, proving that he had downloaded the Intersect, and his dad informed him that the Intersect could have a deleterious effect on the brain, and left abruptly.
After the Ring found him and Chuck fought them off, Stephen revealed that he’d built a device to combat the side-effects of the Intersect, called the Governor, and he hid it in a watch. He also made one for Chuck, which was why he’d run off to his paranoid base to begin with.
In the meantime, Daniel Shaw was revealed to be alive, and had been outfitted with a Ring Intersect. At this point, shit started to get real. Ellie was in Justin’s ‘protective custody’, which backfired when Chuck broke into the facility where she was being held and beat Justin up, not knowing that Ellie was watching. Sarah and Casey had broken in too, and discovered that they were actually in a CIA facility, pieces of which had been corrupted by the Ring. Team Bartowski broke into the hearing about the Intersect project, which contained Shaw. Shaw appeared to flash on some data, and Chuck tried the throw-a-knife-and-hope-self-preservation-kicks-in tactic. Since Shaw has a much higher pain tolerance than Chuck, he didn’t bother to block it, making Chuck look crazy and dangerous in front of the top brass. Chuck was arrested and placed in a holding cell, which didn’t last too long because Stephen hacked the system and guided him out. Chuck and Stephen resolved to return and save Sarah, Casey, and Beckman, who’d been kidnapped, but first they had to talk to Ellie, who knew the real entrance to the Ring base because that’s where Justin had often met her.
Chuck confronted Shaw and suggested a battle of Intersects; Shaw responded by shooting Stephen and killing him, destroying Chuck’s ability to flash with overwhelming emotion. Then to add insult to injury, he stole Chuck’s Governor. Unbeknownst to either of them, Ellie had followed them in and saw the murder, then ran to Devon and Morgan as they plotted a way to save Team Bartowski. The team had been put in an armored truck and Shaw told them he was going to kill them when they got out far enough. Ellie followed the truck on the highway, Devon and Morgan not too far behind in Casey’s tricked-out Crown Victoria.
After rescuing Team Bartowski from Shaw with the heat-seeking missiles in Casey’s car, everyone returned to Castle. From there, Chuck hacked a remote security feed from where Beckman was being held captive; she informed him that at the Joint Security Summit that night, Shaw was going to lead the Ring Elders in a coup d’etat of the entire intelligence community. Team Bartowski concocted an elaborate plan to foil Shaw, complete with Chuck disguising himself and slipping a cell phone into Shaw’s pocket. Shaw was not fooled by the disguise, and sent Ring agents to fight him and Sarah. The Intersect was causing severe damage to Chuck without the Governor, so when he flashed on martial arts he couldn’t use the moves. Luckily Sarah was there to save the day.
As Shaw gave his speech to the conference, he got a call from Chuck on the cell phone that had been slipped into his pocket, telling Shaw he knew about the Elders and to come to his own hotel room to battle. Shaw did so, but apparently hadn’t seen Quantum of Solace, because he first sent a message to the Ring Elders to leave. Like in the movie, it allowed Team Bartowski to identify the Elders, because they were the only people who left. Casey and Morgan captured them, effectively beheading the snake that was the Ring.
Chuck got Shaw to admit what he’d done…and also broadcast it to the entire conference, causing Shaw to self-incriminate in front of the entire intelligence community. Shaw made Chuck flash, weakening him, and went for a dramatic escape out the window.
Hell-bent on revenge, Shaw went to the Buy More and planned to lure Chuck there by kidnapping Sarah. He also tied Morgan up before he could warn the others, and Casey told Morgan to break his thumbs to escape from the handcuffs so he could pull the fire alarm. (Jeff beat him to it, but not after Morgan had already broken his thumbs.) The store was evacuated, and Shaw had captured Sarah and mined the place, planning to detonate it with Sarah inside if Chuck didn’t come to fight him. Though he was still in a great deal of pain, Chuck went to go rescue her, and there was an epic Intersect fight. Chuck was initially knocked out, but his brain ‘rebooted’ when he recovered a memory of downloading a beta version of the Intersect as a child. With his brain working again, he handily defeated Shaw. Morgan picked up the detonator, but since he’d broken his thumbs, he dropped it when they were outside, causing the Buy More to explode.
Chuck promised Ellie he would retire from the spy game, and Morgan, Sarah, Casey, and the Bartowskis held a quiet memorial for Stephen at the apartment. At that point Chuck receives a posthumous recording from his father, informing him of a secret base beneath their old home in Encino, full of the work Stephen had done as a self-hired spy for the last twenty years, doing work that “governments were afraid to do”…including tracking down Mary Bartowski, his missing wife and Chuck and Ellie’s missing mother.
At this point, season 3 ends and I’m bringing Chuck on board the Barge. Also because if this history gets any denser it might create a black hole.
Sample Journal Entry: [The camera comes on, revealing a nervous-looking young man in his late 20s.]
H-hi, hello, Barge. Hi.
Name's Chuck, Chuck Bartowski, I, uh, I fix computers and things. It's my job. Also for fun.
I hope I can help an inmate, I mean, I want to help an inmate. Or many inmates. And it's good to, you know, just get away for a while. It's pretty crazy back at home and there's a whole lot of stuff going on and I'm just going to stop talking now, wow, it is really easy to just keep talking to this little journal thing.
[He claps once, then rubs his hands together.] So, uh...if anyone wants to play Call of Duty or something? Or Halo, or...whatever? I'm your man.
[Aaand cue the nervous, derpy grin!]
Sample RP: Chuck was still getting used to the Barge. Yeah, it was weird. Really weird. Weirder than most things he’d experienced, which, given his life, was saying quite a lot. But at least in his ‘normal’ life, there weren’t characters from 1984 and DC Comics wandering around…and if there were, they kept themselves to San Diego Comic Con, thank you very much.
It was strange, being here alone. No support network. No Ellie, no Morgan, no Awesome, no Casey. No Sarah. But he’d needed to get away for a while, and what better way to do it than to help people redeem themselves? It was kind of like Ellie and Awesome’s trip to Africa for Doctors Without Borders. Only he had absolutely no medical training whatsoever. And was supposed to be saving people’s souls. And also with less Ring operatives poisoning Awesome.
I mean, the Buy More exploded, and I quit being a spy. I need some time off. I need to not be in L.A. right now.
At least his room here was familiar. It was a perfect mirror of his own at home, complete with Xbox and Tron poster. Chuck paused as he was tying the knot on his grey Nerd Herd tie, and then belatedly realized he’d gotten dressed for work. He laughed a little bit. Yeah, he was going to work. Just not the kind of work he was used to.
He reached into his shirt pocket and took out his Nerd Herd badge, weighing it in his hand carefully for a moment, lips pursed in thought. It was so weird to look at his picture on the badge and realize that it had been taken years ago, before the CIA had become a part of his life. It felt like they’d always been there, really. And in a way, what with everything that had happened with his dad, and now what he had started to learn about his mom, they kind of had. Creepy. Had he been destined for the spy life after all? Since birth?
Chuck blinked, snapping himself out of his reverie, and tossed the ID onto his desk. I came here to not think about that. A tiny voice in the back of his mind told him he was running away from his problems. He told that tiny voice to shut up.
The rest of the uniform would work for now. But he didn’t need to wear an ID badge here, for God’s sake. They’d think he was a small-n nerd.
Like that would be anything new.
Special Notes: In Chuck’s own words, from the Nerd Herd website:
My name is Chuck, and I enjoy movies that don't include Meg Ryan, wistfully contemplating the Superbeing somehow never produced by the coupling of Johnny Cash and Miss Moneypenny, foiling elegantly-conceived plans for world domination, riddles, and tacos.
I'm also into science fiction. My favorite is Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," better known as "Blade Runner" to you movie fans out there. I'm a big fan of sci-fi films as well, especially "Dune," but Bob Dylan's "Don't Look Back" and the whole "Die Hard" series are also big favorites of mine.
And anyone who can tell me what the big bouncing balloon means in the TV show "The Prisoner" is aces in my book.
Additionally, Chuck always has several pens and a pen-screwdriver on him for quick-fixes.
User Name/Nick: Alex Prime
User LJ: greencat3
AIM/IM: TeriyakiPickle
E-mail: greencat3 [at] gmail [dot] com
Other Characters: Jason Bourne (brokenweapon), Josiah Bartlet (nobelprez)
Character Name: Charles Irving “Chuck” Bartowski
Series: Chuck
Age: Late 20s - just using Zachary Levi’s age at filming here so I’ll say 29.
From When?: The end of the third season, after he’s quit spying (for about twenty seconds, because Status Quo Is God…and of course the show got picked up for another season, so hooray!).
Inmate/Warden: Warden. Chuck’s a good guy, despite some of the morally grey and flat-out insane things he’s had to do as the Intersect.
Item: His trusty iPhone.
Abilities/Powers: He has a special supercomputer called the Intersect in his head, which “flashes” to show him intelligence on certain people or things. That part is likely not going to see any use on the Barge unless some canon baddies show up for some reason. The Intersect 2.0 also includes instantaneous training on weapons and fighting techniques, but he doesn’t know them all the time and can’t flash/instantly learn them if he’s emotional - which for Chuck is a big problem, because he’s an emotional guy. He also has a bit of an issue with flashing on skills, especially violent ones, at inappropriate times. (He once roundhouse-kicked Lester unconscious because Lester was playfully imitating Steven Seagal’s fighting moves at him. In the Buy More.) The Intersect 2.0 is also affecting his mind - when he’s without the Governor, he can’t sleep without having some incredibly vivid, disturbing dream caused by it. The Intersect 2.0 will also slowly drive him insane without the Governor, causing horrible, Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem-type effects - e.g. he can see the world ‘glitching’ (like everything looks upside down for a moment, there are visual distortions like ‘dead pixels’), loud screeching sounds in his ears, and splitting headaches. So being Chuck is not always fun and games time.
Note: It’s not entirely clear if he needs the Governor anymore since his “reboot” during the fight with Shaw. I’ll check during season 4 and adjust as necessary.
Chuck also speaks Klingon.
Personality:
“Chuck is brave. Chuck is loyal. You know, Chuck can quote Wrath of Khan word for word, and Chuck is courageous. Chuck’s got a wicked vinyl collection, and Chuck has the wisdom not to eat garbage from the break room crisper.” - Morgan Grimes, 1x06, ‘Chuck versus the Sandworm’
Chuck is a nice guy caught in a cruel world. He’s intelligent - went to Stanford on scholarship - and personable. Overall, his honesty and integrity are deeply important to him (which might explain why he was so exceptionally angry about Bryce Larkin planting the test key that got him kicked out of Stanford under his bed). He struggles to maintain those principles in his new spy life, but it’s difficult when he has to deceive everyone he loves, including his sister, his best friend, and his father (for a time). Chuck is a responsible man, willing to own up when he’s screwed the pooch on an operation, and he’s willing to do almost anything - usually alone - to make it right again. He went to insane lengths to retrieve his sister’s wedding ring from a Fulcrum agent who had gotten it by accident and decided to help save a Chinese agent’s brother from kidnappers because his own ineptitude had foiled the initial rescue attempt.
Chuck’s family and friends are extremely important to him, even to the point where he and his sister were poisoned, and he gave the only antidote available to her. He has frequently disobeyed orders when they could have endangered his friends. Unfortunately, his affable and trusting nature has been used against him; he’s been manipulated by both enemy agents (read: his ex-girlfriend Jill) and his own team (read: Casey, Carina). Chuck is a caring, sensitive, funny guy - the type girls always say they want, but never go for.
Buried deeply beneath Chuck’s timid demeanor is a wellspring of courage. While he admits a very low tolerance for pain and a crippling fear of needles, he can summon the will to risk his own life if it means he’s protecting people close to him, such as his family or his team. His phobia of needles is so great that he goaded an enemy agent into threatening torture with a massive syringe - while it seems counterproductive, it served the purpose of making him pass out in sheer terror. He did manage to temporarily overcome this fear of needles when saving a room full of scientists - and Casey - by allowing himself to be injected with a modified virus so his blood would create antibodies for those who were infected.
As the supervisor of the “Nerd Herd” at the Buy More (the fictitious Best Buy-like chain) in Burbank, Chuck is a problem-solver, and very, very good with all kinds of technology (and the creator of a rather nasty computer virus which they used to call the “Bartowski Special” back at Stanford). He even figured out how to defuse a bomb using a computer virus from a porn website (really). He’s very observant and can tackle almost any type of puzzle, Intersect or no Intersect. (However, he’s prone to making very obvious statements when he’s nervous or in shock: “Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh…you’re not dead…”) Chuck is also an avid gamer, taking time out for such staples as Gears of War, Call of Duty, and Halo. Outside of video games, he has a fondness for sci-fi movies like Tron and Dune, even going so far as to dress up as a Sandworm with his best friend Morgan each Halloween. He once used his knowledge of flight simulators to safely land a helicopter - and used the latent mathematical patterns in the Rush song “Tom Sawyer” to beat Missile Command and prevent World War III - so don’t let anyone tell him that video games are a waste of time. He’s also a comic book fan, so watch out, Marvel/DCverse peeps, he’s going to be fanboying all up in your business.
Path to Redemption: N/A
History: Chuck Bartowski has lived in California his entire life; he was born and raised in Encino. When he was about nine or ten years old, he wandered into his father’s home office and accidentally downloaded the Intersect prototype into his head. Remarkably, he suffered no ill effects and was mostly confused, and his father was incredibly relieved that the Intersect hadn’t destroyed his mind. It was around that time that their mother was captured by enemy agents (or left of her own free will; at this point canon is still ambiguous on whether she’s good or evil), rendering his father Stephen “never really there” and eternally preoccupied. Stephen left his children when Chuck was in high school to protect them from his research. (In a bit of Fridge Brilliance, Chuck scored incredibly high on a subliminal image test in college, making him a prime target for CIA recruitment until Bryce got him kicked out of Stanford. His proto-Intersect might have influenced his ability to retain and process large amounts of information and thus render him the best person to actually use the Intersect. It’s destiny, I tells ya.)
Chuck entered Stanford University in 1999, a scholarship student, and met Bryce Larkin, a fellow freshman - soon to be his greatest friend and worst enemy. Bryce introduced him to Jill Roberts, who Chuck began to date. Things were going great for Chuck until his senior year, when Bryce Larkin framed him for cheating on a midterm exam. Due to Stanford’s zero-tolerance cheating policy, he was immediately kicked out of school, twelve credits short of attaining an engineering degree. After getting a job at the Burbank Buy More with his best friend Morgan, he went to visit Jill and explain to her that he didn’t cheat on the test, but she was already dating Bryce.
Years went by, and Chuck moved in with his sister Ellie and her boyfriend Devon (aka Captain Awesome), both doctors. On his 26th birthday, Chuck received an email from none other than Bryce Larkin, who was now working for the CIA (and, unbeknownst to Chuck at the time, had been shot in his attempt to escape). When Chuck opened the email and solved a simple riddle about a game they had both played extensively in college, the entire contents of the Intersect were downloaded into his brain, a process that took all night and left him with a lasting headache.
The CIA and NSA both independently sent agents to find who Bryce had sent the Intersect to. The CIA agent, Sarah Walker, went to Chuck’s place of employment and flirted with him to figure out where he lived. Chuck came home with his best friend Morgan to find a ninja (Sarah) trying to steal his computer. In the ensuing tussle (in which the boys were laughably outmatched), the computer was destroyed, making Chuck the only source of Intersect data in the entire world. Undaunted, Sarah got a date with Chuck to try and find out what he knew about the Intersect and Bryce. The NSA, however, was less inclined to take the subtle route. An entire team of goons went after Chuck on his ‘date’ with Sarah, forcing her to break her cover and get Chuck out of danger. John Casey, the NSA agent in charge, pursued them and confronted Sarah on a rooftop, preparing to shoot Chuck. Chuck managed to save his own skin by “flashing” (accessing Intersect data) on an important general who was giving a talk at a nearby hotel...and the bomb plot that was supposed to kill him. Sarah and Casey took him to the hotel and Chuck was able to defuse the bomb.
The two agencies, led by General Beckman and Director Graham, were at a loss as to what to do with him. Casey wanted Chuck to be locked away in a secure facility, given the volume of sensitive information in his noggin. Sarah wanted to try and get it out of him so he could resume a normal life. Chuck decided that since he held all the cards, he was going to walk away and pretend it never happened.
Fat chance of that. The next morning, John Casey showed up at the Buy More, taking a cover job as a “green shirt” to stay close to Chuck. Sarah took a job at the hot dog restaurant across the parking lot, the Wienerlicious (which came complete with a very fanservicey uniform). The two agents were in town to stay, at least until the new Intersect was built, both under orders to protect him. Casey also had orders to kill Chuck when the new Intersect came online, because they wouldn’t be able to guarantee the security of the old Intersect.
As usual, nothing came easy. The doctor who was supposed to remove the Intersect from Chuck’s head ended up being rogue and trying to sell him to North Korea. Sarah and Casey were stuck with Chuck, and Chuck was stuck with the Intersect in his head. He was proven not to be entirely useless when his unique skills led Sarah and Casey to take down a ruthless arms dealer known only as La Ciudad…at an art auction. Hilarity ensued. Chuck’s exploits with the Intersect included such varied missions as stealing a diamond from a terrorist financier, rescuing a Chinese agent’s brother from an LA Triad in exchange for her defection, and disarming a bomb set by a mad genius (seriously) that would have exploded the Santa Monica Pier on Halloween. Unfortunately, the last mission had required him to give up his shot at the Assistant Manager position at the Buy More, leaving the store in the hated hands of one Harry Tang (since the real manager, Big Mike, is content to rely on the ‘AssMan’).
Chuck’s life was further complicated when he had to go on a mission to save the professor who had kicked him out of Stanford, because the professor worked for the CIA. Chuck refused at first, but later flashed on his old college ID and discovered that all his data up through college had been put into the Intersect. His curiosity was enough to get him to return to Stanford, and while he was there he discovered that Bryce had gotten him expelled because he hadn’t wanted Chuck to be recruited into the CIA, even though it ended up destroying their very close friendship.
And speak of the devil - Bryce Larkin wasn’t dead at all. He had been rescued by Fulcrum, a corrupt organization within the intelligence community, because he’d managed to convince them that he had downloaded the Intersect, so it was in their best interests to keep him alive. He used Team Bartowski to help him come in and let the CIA know that he wasn’t actually a rogue agent. Afterwards he left on another mission, going back to chase down and destroy Fulcrum.
Shortly after that, the new Intersect was getting ready to be brought online, and Chuck discovered Fulcrum bugs within the Buy More. The next morning Chuck went to the Buy More to find that everything had disappeared, because the CIA had removed it all to a warehouse to check for bugs. This was a problem, because Devon had given Chuck an engagement ring to take care of so Ellie wouldn’t find it, and Chuck had left it in his locker at the Buy More. However, the ring wasn’t in the CIA’s custody, and Chuck was also confronted with the very real possibility that he’d been compromised and would have to be put in a bunker, away from his family and friends and able to give them no warning or explanation. Happily, the intel receiver was retrieved by the CIA before it could end up in Fulcrum’s hands, Chuck didn’t have to go underground, and he found Awesome’s engagement ring. Awesome proposed to Ellie, and for a little while it seemed like everything was all right in Chuck’s world.
With the news that the new Intersect was ready, Chuck was nearly ecstatic. Finally, he could have a normal life again, even if that did mean he would lose Sarah. Still, he persuaded her to go on a real date with him before she was out of his life. Unfortunately, Fulcrum had tampered with the component parts of the new Intersect computer, causing it to explode and kill Director Graham and all of the CIA agents trying to download it into their brains. In the meantime, Casey crept through Chuck’s apartment, preparing to carry out the kill order he’d been assigned in the event that the human Intersect became redundant. Thankfully, seconds before he was about to shoot, the doorbell rang and Chuck went to go answer it. It was Sarah with the bad news, and Casey left, relieved, since he hadn’t wanted to kill Chuck.
So the Intersect and Team Bartowski were set to fight Fulcrum how they could, with a spanking new spy base, called Castle, under the frozen yogurt shop Orange Orange (which means Sarah got a less fanservicey uniform). Chuck ended up briefly getting back together with his ex-girlfriend Jill, who (surprise!) actually turned out to be a Fulcrum agent. He met Sarah’s father, a con man named Jack Burton, and attended her high school reunion. While on a mission pretending to be a married couple in the suburbs, Chuck was captured and forced by all the Fulcrum agents living in their housing development to download a Fulcrum version of the Intersect that had either driven mad or killed all other subjects. He was all right, but he tricked them into downloading it as well. They weren’t as lucky.
Chuck had been personally researching the Intersect itself and its mysterious creator Orion, hiding a complex diagram of what he knew on the back of the Tron poster his father had given him as a child. Since Ellie’s wedding was coming up, Chuck and Sarah used CIA resources to locate Stephen Bartowski. They managed to persuade him to come back for Ellie’s wedding, while Chuck infiltrated the headquarters of his father’s old rival Ted Roark. Stephen had come to confront Roark himself, and Chuck saved him from a beating by Roark’s security team. His father returned the favor by revealing that he was in fact Orion, and had left to protect his family from those who would use the Intersect for evil. Almost immediately after this Stephen was captured by Roark’s people and forced to build a new Fulcrum Intersect in a secret facility outside of Barstow. Roark would have killed Chuck but Stephen agreed to go quietly if his son was safe.
After using Jill to get further information about Fulcrum, Chuck let her go in direct violation of orders. This was the last straw; General Beckman told Sarah to bring Chuck in so they could put him in a bunker because he was becoming too hard to control. Sarah realized she was in love with Chuck and defied this order, running to Barstow to try and save Stephen. Casey was promoted to Colonel and sent to capture the runaways. He did so, fighting off a Fulcrum team, and took the pair into custody. Meanwhile, Devon had grown suspicious about Chuck’s disappearance and Casey’s odd behavior (like breaking into Chuck’s room to search around). He feared Casey had kidnapped Chuck, and his instincts were technically correct. While Casey went back to his apartment when he noticed Devon snooping around on the security cameras, Chuck and Sarah escaped from the base due to temporary power outage and followed him, intent on preventing a massacre. Awesome managed to hold his own until the cavalry arrived, and Chuck was left with no choice but to tell him about his double life - and make him promise not to tell Ellie.
Chuck and Sarah tied Casey up and went back to Barstow; Casey followed them once he managed to get out of his bonds, pissed off that they hadn’t asked him to help. Roark was preparing to use the new Intersect that Stephen had created to make an army of Fulcrum agents. Stephen told Chuck to look at the screen while the Intersect files were flickering across it; he had made an anti-Intersect instead, which did nothing to the amassed Fulcrum agents but removed the Intersect from Chuck’s head. Naturally, they had to explode Roark’s base before they left with Stephen in tow for Ellie’s wedding the next day. Chuck was now Intersect-less; he and Sarah could finally date.
However, the day of the wedding, new orders came in. Casey was to leave with his Special Forces team, and gave Chuck his personal number in case of emergency. Sarah was reassigned to be Bryce Larkin’s partner again, and Chuck was asked to work on the new Intersect program. He refused, wanting to return to a normal life. Of course, this being Chuck’s life, something was bound to go wrong. Roark showed up to the wedding, demanding the Intersect (while the wedding guests were distracted by Jeff and Lester’s rather splendid rendition of Mr. Roboto). Chuck had called Casey, who came to the rescue with his team in the nick of time and captured Roark, but the wedding had been ruined and Ellie was pissed. Chuck used the generous government stipend he’d been given for his services as the Intersect to set up a new wedding, and Sarah let Bryce know that she wasn’t going to go with him.
In the meantime, it turned out that one of Casey’s men was a traitor and murdered Roark, as well as the rest of Casey’s team, only sparing the colonel because Casey had saved his life. The traitor also revealed that he was not a part of Fulcrum before knocking Casey out. Bryce left the wedding party with a man posing as a government agent as Stephen watched, but Stephen had uploaded a very early beta version of the Intersect into his own head and knew that the agent with Bryce was not to be trusted. He told Sarah and Chuck, who went to go rescue Casey and Bryce from the ambush.
With Casey in tow, they headed to the building Bryce had been taken to. Bryce had escaped into the Intersect vault, but he’d incurred a fatal gunshot wound, and told Chuck to destroy the new Intersect since it was too powerful to let fall into the wrong hands. He also informed Chuck that Fulcrum was only one small part of an even shadowier organization called the Ring, and died. Chuck downloaded the new Intersect before destroying it. The Ring operatives, led by the traitor, brought Sarah and Casey in as prisoners, preparing to kill them for destroying the Intersect. The moment Sarah was threatened, Chuck flashed on something he’d never been able to use before - epic fighting skills. This led to the worst ending for a season (and possible series) finale ever.
Thankfully, it was not so, and the series continued. Chuck had been training to become a real spy to make better use of the Intersect 2.0, but he flunked out of spy school when his emotions got out of control and he couldn’t properly flash on skills, and he’d refused to run away with Sarah. He returned to Echo Park and was depressed for long enough to end up looking like Jeff Bridges in The Big Lebowski, all unkempt and surviving on nothing but cheeseballs. After being humiliated by Emmett, the Buy More’s new manager (who had deposed Big Mike in a Godfather-worthy coup), Chuck used his key to get into Castle and meet with Casey, who mentioned that he and Sarah had a mission. Desperate to do something worthwhile, Chuck re-acquired personal grooming habits and crashed the mission. Sarah and Casey were convinced he was going to ruin it until he ended up showing off what the Intersect 2.0 could do; they were re-convinced when Chuck tackled Sarah to get her out of a Ring assassin’s line of fire, believing he was ruining the mission because he was jealous. The assassin’s men later captured Chuck and Sarah at the Buy More, and Casey had to go rescue them in Mexico - but not before Chuck regained his confidence and ability to flash in dangerous situations. At the end of the episode, Chuck got his job back - both with the government, and at Buy More. Chuck and Sarah ended up reconciling later when she found out that he had decided not to run away with her because he knew he had the chance to do something good and help people, and she’d had faith in him, and that he loved her.
Captain Awesome was later mistaken for the resident spy in the Bartowski family, and Chuck had to divert the Ring away - which meant killing the leader of the local Ring cell. This was carried out by a new agent who had just been assigned to Team Bartowski: Daniel Shaw, the CIA’s expert on the Ring. Incidentally, his wife had also been killed by the Ring. Thinking it was time to move on, Shaw began pursuing Sarah.
As the season progressed, Chuck was given more spy duties, such as an asset of his own, who he later had to have put in a bunker; torturing Casey to sell his cover as an assassin; and removing a bullet from Casey’s leg when he flashed on medical skills.
The Ring had tracked the spies enough to figure out that Castle was in some way connected with the Buy More, and sent their men in under cover of merger operations to try and locate the entrance to Castle or any spies within the store. This was a bad idea, because the Buy Morians revolted. With Nerf guns. Chuck was also in the Buy More at the time because Shaw had benched him for not being able to flash due to his emotional issues, which is kind of what happens when you shack up with your asset’s one true love. During the lockdown of the Buy More, Morgan discovers the secret entrance into Castle by following the Ring operatives, and he and Chuck are captured and tied up. Chuck tells Morgan everything, and through their talk Chuck regained the ability to flash. He then proceeded to kick the ass of every single Ring agent except the last one (who Morgan got). Shaw was all ready to set Morgan up in Witness Protection, but Chuck countered that Morgan could be a valuable member of the team. Shaw let him stay, much to Morgan’s relief.
It was also discovered that Casey’s real name was not John Casey, but Alex Coburn. He’d faked his own death in 1989 to join an NSA black ops team, unaware that his fiancée was pregnant at the time. Surprise, Casey. Casey’s old commanding officer was blackmailing Casey into stealing an emotional suppressant called Laudanol - if he didn’t, Casey’s old fiancée was going to be killed. Chuck took the Laudanol to help control his emotions, and for a short fight scene the Intersect 2.0’s true power was revealed, since it basically turned Chuck into the Terminator until Sarah stopped him from strangling a Ring operative to death with his bare hands. Casey also discovered that his fiancée had been pregnant, and now had a college-aged daughter named Alex, after him. Although Casey had killed his old commanding officer, he had still committed treason - which, let’s be honest, is par for the course on Team Bartowski at this point - so General Beckman stripped him of his rank and his spy duties. John Casey was now a civilian. And then there were three.
Shaw thought that it was time for Chuck to become a real spy by completing a red test - that is, by making his first kill. Chuck was supposed to shoot a mole, but couldn’t go through with it, so Casey the civilian shot the mole from the shadows, leading Sarah and Shaw to believe that Chuck had in fact completed the red test. Unfortunately for Chuck, this means that Sarah thinks he’s not the same person anymore, and she doesn’t love the “new Chuck”. Chuck was sent to Washington, DC to be officially inducted as an agent, and returned to Burbank the next day to assemble his team for his new mission in Rome.
Sarah wouldn’t take his calls, so Morgan and Devon borrowed Jeff’s stalker van, and Chuck, to stakeout Sarah and Shaw on a date. Morgan lured Shaw out by pretending to be a Ring agent, and then they were attacked by actual Ring agents. Shaw decided to swallow a tracking device to call in an airstrike and use himself as bait to destroy the Ring once and for all. The Ring found the tracking device and removed it from Shaw; in the meantime, Sarah refused to let Shaw go alone and Chuck locked her in Castle while he went to go save Shaw. Sarah got in touch with Casey at the Buy More, who came to free her.
While a prisoner of the Ring, Shaw was shown the surveillance footage of the night his wife was killed, which revealed that Sarah had been the assassin on her red test, working under the CIA’s orders, not the Ring’s. At that point Shaw pretty much snapped and went over to the Dark Side. As Chuck didn’t know this, he went and managed to rescue Shaw anyway. Chuck asked Sarah to go with him to Rome, mirroring their exchange from earlier, and Casey informed her that he had been the one to shoot the mole, not Chuck. Shaw came to Sarah’s apartment before she left to meet with Chuck, telling her that they had a new mission. Back at Castle, Chuck was shown the footage of Shaw’s wife’s death, and realized that Sarah was not safe around Shaw.
Shaw faked everyone out by pretending that he forgave Sarah, and the three of them were ordered on a mission in DC to find the Ring Director, who has Intersect components. Shaw apparently kills him, as Sarah and Chuck hear a gunshot, but that was just a ruse. Shaw had joined the Ring. While playing both sides, Shaw gets a mission to go to Paris with Sarah, trying to find other Intersect components that had been traced there. Morgan’s extensive knowledge of action movie fight scenes helped him identify Shaw’s fight in the surveillance footage from DC as choreographed, and Chuck realized that Shaw was working for the Ring. He tried to contact General Beckman, but she was angry about Morgan, a civilian, being in Castle and suspended Chuck from duty. Chuck teamed up with Casey to fly to Paris and stop Shaw.
Shaw poisoned Sarah with a temporary paralytic agent and Sarah was forced to watch as he handed over the technical specs of the Intersect to the Director. At that point Chuck and Casey arrived. Casey took off after the Director while Chuck confronted Shaw. They fought, and Shaw won, but Chuck sought out a gun and pursued him to a bridge, where Shaw intended to throw the paralyzed Sarah into the Seine and let her drown. Reasoning failed, so Chuck shot Shaw in the chest three times. Shaw fell off the bridge and almost dragged Sarah down with him, but Chuck saved her.
Casey had captured the Director and was rewarded with his rank and job back, as well as getting Morgan a place on Team Bartowski for all his help in identifying Shaw as an enemy agent. Finally, Chuck and Sarah were able to start a real relationship. They ran, but ended up stumbling onto a Basque terrorist and going on “one last mission”. Morgan and Casey tracked them down, they realized that they didn’t want to quit being spies after all, and while General Beckman disapproved of their relationship on principle, off the record she admitted to them that it was “about damn time” they got together.
And for a little while, things were okay.
Right up until the Intersect started messing with Chuck’s brain. Chuck started to have surreal and disturbing dreams, which he interpreted as flashes, but nobody would believe him. After he nearly caused an international incident by punching a foreign dignitary in the face (to knock out a fake tooth filled with intel), Beckman stripped him of active rank and put him in a mental hospital for CIA burnouts. The real intel tooth was eventually found when the dignitary came to kill Chuck in the hospital, and Chuck was reinstated. With the reinstatement came a warning from his psychiatrist that the Intersect posed a very real danger to Chuck’s mental health with continued use. Chuck dreamed that Shaw was alive…and given that his Intersect-assisted dreams so far had turned out to be true, he was worried.
It was around this time that Ellie and Devon went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo with Doctors Without Borders. While they were there, a Ring agent poisoned Awesome and made it look like malaria, forcing them to return home so Devon could be treated and recover. When they were back in Burbank, Ellie was contacted by the Ring agent, Justin, who was posing as a CIA operative. Team Bartowski raided Shaw’s old penthouse at the same time as Justin, who told them that Shaw was in fact dead, but Chuck’s dreams didn’t stop.
Justin convinced Ellie to contact her father, luring him in from hiding. Since Stephen Bartowski is both observant and a little crazy, he figured out that Chuck had the Intersect 2.0…by throwing a knife at his son’s face. Chuck caught it, proving that he had downloaded the Intersect, and his dad informed him that the Intersect could have a deleterious effect on the brain, and left abruptly.
After the Ring found him and Chuck fought them off, Stephen revealed that he’d built a device to combat the side-effects of the Intersect, called the Governor, and he hid it in a watch. He also made one for Chuck, which was why he’d run off to his paranoid base to begin with.
In the meantime, Daniel Shaw was revealed to be alive, and had been outfitted with a Ring Intersect. At this point, shit started to get real. Ellie was in Justin’s ‘protective custody’, which backfired when Chuck broke into the facility where she was being held and beat Justin up, not knowing that Ellie was watching. Sarah and Casey had broken in too, and discovered that they were actually in a CIA facility, pieces of which had been corrupted by the Ring. Team Bartowski broke into the hearing about the Intersect project, which contained Shaw. Shaw appeared to flash on some data, and Chuck tried the throw-a-knife-and-hope-self-preservation-kicks-in tactic. Since Shaw has a much higher pain tolerance than Chuck, he didn’t bother to block it, making Chuck look crazy and dangerous in front of the top brass. Chuck was arrested and placed in a holding cell, which didn’t last too long because Stephen hacked the system and guided him out. Chuck and Stephen resolved to return and save Sarah, Casey, and Beckman, who’d been kidnapped, but first they had to talk to Ellie, who knew the real entrance to the Ring base because that’s where Justin had often met her.
Chuck confronted Shaw and suggested a battle of Intersects; Shaw responded by shooting Stephen and killing him, destroying Chuck’s ability to flash with overwhelming emotion. Then to add insult to injury, he stole Chuck’s Governor. Unbeknownst to either of them, Ellie had followed them in and saw the murder, then ran to Devon and Morgan as they plotted a way to save Team Bartowski. The team had been put in an armored truck and Shaw told them he was going to kill them when they got out far enough. Ellie followed the truck on the highway, Devon and Morgan not too far behind in Casey’s tricked-out Crown Victoria.
After rescuing Team Bartowski from Shaw with the heat-seeking missiles in Casey’s car, everyone returned to Castle. From there, Chuck hacked a remote security feed from where Beckman was being held captive; she informed him that at the Joint Security Summit that night, Shaw was going to lead the Ring Elders in a coup d’etat of the entire intelligence community. Team Bartowski concocted an elaborate plan to foil Shaw, complete with Chuck disguising himself and slipping a cell phone into Shaw’s pocket. Shaw was not fooled by the disguise, and sent Ring agents to fight him and Sarah. The Intersect was causing severe damage to Chuck without the Governor, so when he flashed on martial arts he couldn’t use the moves. Luckily Sarah was there to save the day.
As Shaw gave his speech to the conference, he got a call from Chuck on the cell phone that had been slipped into his pocket, telling Shaw he knew about the Elders and to come to his own hotel room to battle. Shaw did so, but apparently hadn’t seen Quantum of Solace, because he first sent a message to the Ring Elders to leave. Like in the movie, it allowed Team Bartowski to identify the Elders, because they were the only people who left. Casey and Morgan captured them, effectively beheading the snake that was the Ring.
Chuck got Shaw to admit what he’d done…and also broadcast it to the entire conference, causing Shaw to self-incriminate in front of the entire intelligence community. Shaw made Chuck flash, weakening him, and went for a dramatic escape out the window.
Hell-bent on revenge, Shaw went to the Buy More and planned to lure Chuck there by kidnapping Sarah. He also tied Morgan up before he could warn the others, and Casey told Morgan to break his thumbs to escape from the handcuffs so he could pull the fire alarm. (Jeff beat him to it, but not after Morgan had already broken his thumbs.) The store was evacuated, and Shaw had captured Sarah and mined the place, planning to detonate it with Sarah inside if Chuck didn’t come to fight him. Though he was still in a great deal of pain, Chuck went to go rescue her, and there was an epic Intersect fight. Chuck was initially knocked out, but his brain ‘rebooted’ when he recovered a memory of downloading a beta version of the Intersect as a child. With his brain working again, he handily defeated Shaw. Morgan picked up the detonator, but since he’d broken his thumbs, he dropped it when they were outside, causing the Buy More to explode.
Chuck promised Ellie he would retire from the spy game, and Morgan, Sarah, Casey, and the Bartowskis held a quiet memorial for Stephen at the apartment. At that point Chuck receives a posthumous recording from his father, informing him of a secret base beneath their old home in Encino, full of the work Stephen had done as a self-hired spy for the last twenty years, doing work that “governments were afraid to do”…including tracking down Mary Bartowski, his missing wife and Chuck and Ellie’s missing mother.
At this point, season 3 ends and I’m bringing Chuck on board the Barge. Also because if this history gets any denser it might create a black hole.
Sample Journal Entry: [The camera comes on, revealing a nervous-looking young man in his late 20s.]
H-hi, hello, Barge. Hi.
Name's Chuck, Chuck Bartowski, I, uh, I fix computers and things. It's my job. Also for fun.
I hope I can help an inmate, I mean, I want to help an inmate. Or many inmates. And it's good to, you know, just get away for a while. It's pretty crazy back at home and there's a whole lot of stuff going on and I'm just going to stop talking now, wow, it is really easy to just keep talking to this little journal thing.
[He claps once, then rubs his hands together.] So, uh...if anyone wants to play Call of Duty or something? Or Halo, or...whatever? I'm your man.
[Aaand cue the nervous, derpy grin!]
Sample RP: Chuck was still getting used to the Barge. Yeah, it was weird. Really weird. Weirder than most things he’d experienced, which, given his life, was saying quite a lot. But at least in his ‘normal’ life, there weren’t characters from 1984 and DC Comics wandering around…and if there were, they kept themselves to San Diego Comic Con, thank you very much.
It was strange, being here alone. No support network. No Ellie, no Morgan, no Awesome, no Casey. No Sarah. But he’d needed to get away for a while, and what better way to do it than to help people redeem themselves? It was kind of like Ellie and Awesome’s trip to Africa for Doctors Without Borders. Only he had absolutely no medical training whatsoever. And was supposed to be saving people’s souls. And also with less Ring operatives poisoning Awesome.
I mean, the Buy More exploded, and I quit being a spy. I need some time off. I need to not be in L.A. right now.
At least his room here was familiar. It was a perfect mirror of his own at home, complete with Xbox and Tron poster. Chuck paused as he was tying the knot on his grey Nerd Herd tie, and then belatedly realized he’d gotten dressed for work. He laughed a little bit. Yeah, he was going to work. Just not the kind of work he was used to.
He reached into his shirt pocket and took out his Nerd Herd badge, weighing it in his hand carefully for a moment, lips pursed in thought. It was so weird to look at his picture on the badge and realize that it had been taken years ago, before the CIA had become a part of his life. It felt like they’d always been there, really. And in a way, what with everything that had happened with his dad, and now what he had started to learn about his mom, they kind of had. Creepy. Had he been destined for the spy life after all? Since birth?
Chuck blinked, snapping himself out of his reverie, and tossed the ID onto his desk. I came here to not think about that. A tiny voice in the back of his mind told him he was running away from his problems. He told that tiny voice to shut up.
The rest of the uniform would work for now. But he didn’t need to wear an ID badge here, for God’s sake. They’d think he was a small-n nerd.
Like that would be anything new.
Special Notes: In Chuck’s own words, from the Nerd Herd website:
My name is Chuck, and I enjoy movies that don't include Meg Ryan, wistfully contemplating the Superbeing somehow never produced by the coupling of Johnny Cash and Miss Moneypenny, foiling elegantly-conceived plans for world domination, riddles, and tacos.
I'm also into science fiction. My favorite is Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," better known as "Blade Runner" to you movie fans out there. I'm a big fan of sci-fi films as well, especially "Dune," but Bob Dylan's "Don't Look Back" and the whole "Die Hard" series are also big favorites of mine.
And anyone who can tell me what the big bouncing balloon means in the TV show "The Prisoner" is aces in my book.
Additionally, Chuck always has several pens and a pen-screwdriver on him for quick-fixes.